


Inscrutable House

by anneapocalypse



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Chex Week, Death, Denial, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 23:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11046258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: All she knows is her mother isn't really gone. Her father says so.





	Inscrutable House

**Author's Note:**

> Time to plant tears, says the almanac.  
> The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove  
> and the child draws another inscrutable house. 
> 
> -Elizabeth Bishop, [“Sestina”](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sestina/)

At a house on the outskirts of Austin, a little girl comes home from school, stepping out of the heat and noise of the school bus onto the curb. She makes the walk alone up the long driveway to the front door with a fan-shaped glass window set far above her head.

The door is unlocked, so she doesn’t need her key. She gives the door a hard push behind her to close it. Her father always says _Don’t slam the door_ , but it sticks in the threshold, when the wood swells in the summer heat.

Her father doesn’t hear her come in. He’s on the phone.

He’s on the phone every day. Ever since the woman in blue came to the door, a dark blue uniform like the one her mother has. Her daddy told her to go upstairs to her room. When she whined, he yelled and she stomped all the way, on every step.

She could hear him yelling even from upstairs. It didn’t make sense what he was saying. There's been a mistake, he said, over and over. Mistake. Mistake. Mistake.

 

She puts down her backpack by the door. She doesn’t have homework yet. She’s only in first grade. She knows how to read already, and the books in school are too easy.

Daddy is on the phone. She can see the little hands-free earpiece clipped to his ear, as he paces heavily from the open door of his office, through the living room, through the dining room, to the kitchen, and back again without getting anything.

“I want to talk to somebody who knows something,” he says. “I want to talk to—well, then, _find_ me somebody who does.”

Daddy is busy on the phone. He doesn’t hear her go upstairs.

 

In her room she counts out crayons. Peach for Mommy and Daddy’s faces. Yellow for Mommy’s hair. Blue for Mommy’s uniform and Mommy’s eyes. Black for Daddy’s hair and Daddy’s pants and Daddy’s tie, and to outline Daddy’s shirt because you can’t draw white on white. Green for Daddy’s eyes.

Brown for the house. Blue sky, big yellow sun. It’s hot today. June in Texas. School will be out soon. And then Mommy’s supposed to come home.

She draws carefully, a picture she’s drawn before and knows by heart. She doesn’t make any mistakes.

 

It’s quiet now downstairs. Daddy’s off the phone. She puts the last touch on the picture—Daddy’s glasses, black frames she carefully draws in two squares—and takes it downstairs. Daddy’s in the kitchen at the stove. She goes to the fridge and pulls two magnets off carefully and hangs the picture up as high as she can reach. Daddy forgets to put them up so she does it for him. It smells like macaroni and cheese in the kitchen, and she can hear the sound of a spoon stirring, stirring in a saucepan.

“Daddy, what day is Mommy coming home?”

Scrape, scrape, the spoon keeps stirring.

“Daddy?”

“They don’t know yet.”

Her father’s voice sounds like a string when you pull it tight between your hands.

“You called them again today.”

“They still don’t know.”

“Okay,” she says.

 

Daddy doesn’t watch her eat or tell her to clean her plate, but she does anyway. Macaroni and cheese is her favorite, and she likes to eat her hot dog last, squishing the cut-up pieces around in the leftover cheese until they’re all cheesy and then eating them. Daddy doesn’t tell her not to play with her food. He eats half his plate and then gets up from the table. You’re not supposed to get up from the table before you’re finished. It’s the rules.

“Daddy has to do some work in his office,” he says. “Finish your dinner and go up to your room.”

 

* * *

 

That summer, the house is quiet, and Mommy doesn't come home, and Daddy spends a lot of time in his office, and Mommy doesn’t come home, and every day Daddy makes phone calls and his voice gets angry and he doesn’t finish his dinner and he shuts himself up in his office and the little girl draws pictures of the house with all the people who are supposed to be in it and reads books that are too old for her and learns well the meaning of _Not yet_ and _We don’t know_.

She doesn’t see the news because Daddy never turns on PUBCOM anymore. She isn’t allowed in her father’s office, or on his computer, and sometimes he leaves his personal datapad lying around but she’s not supposed to touch it, and it always has grown-up, boring stuff on it anyway.

She is six, and though she can read above her grade level, she hasn’t yet learned to poke around in places she isn’t supposed to be, find things she isn’t supposed to know. She’ll be twice that age before she thinks to go looking—thinks to search her father’s desk and find the letter, dated _May 30, 2528,_ two years before her father said the words out loud.

She will be a grown woman before she understands that he never really believed them at all.


End file.
